


The First Time Vanus Leaves

by ebsmith



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls Online
Genre: Canon Backstory, Death, Disturbing Themes, Elder Scrolls Lore, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, I suppose, Parent-Child Relationship, Poverty, Pre-Canon, Social Commentary, Spouse Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:20:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22187719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ebsmith/pseuds/ebsmith
Summary: A speculation of under what circumstances Vanus Galerion might have left his former life. Sourced from both Galerion the Mystic and Vanus's own Artaeum Lost.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	The First Time Vanus Leaves

  
Trechtus's parents fight all the time and he always finds himself caught in the middle. He loves both his parents but is confused by his father’s actions toward his mother even as he is kind to Trechtus - or kind in a manner of speaking anyway, what with teaching him to read and all. His father would rail at the world, saying he was better than this, that they were better than this. “This is how you become better Trechtus,” he says, while showing him a small battered pamphlet with a crude picture of a ship on the front. “Knowledge is Power Trechtus, and we will have it someday mark my words! But to get that power, we need to be able to learn. And reading is the best way of learning there is.”

And so his father taught him to read at the age of seven, and he would practice into the night, burying himself in whatever worn and beaten tomes his father brought home with him. He'd read and do his best to ignore the screaming matches outside his thin bedroom wall, more a partition off the main sitting room really. Trechtus had truly no idea what his parents argued about, or what his mother would say to his father that would incense him enough to hit her. He wondered if she didn’t deserve it somehow. His mother insisted that everything happened for a reason.

His kind and pretty mother, who would hold him at night and sing hymns to him and tell him stories about the Eight Divines and their place in the world. How Auri-El was the greatest of them all, and how as the Seven bowed to the One, they too must bow to their Lord and their lot in life, for it was the Way of things. He would listen and nod and fall asleep to her songs, but he didn’t really believe. His books, their knowledge, and the worlds they revealed are the only thing that keep him sane in his waking world of poverty and endless grind. 

Like all members of the lower Casts, he was put to work nearly as soon as he could walk. Being a highly intelligent child was no help at all in this, and actually made his situation worse. When you are naturally good at things, you want to make them better. But those in that world don't want to make things better. They don't want your mind, only your back and feet and hands. He learns very quickly that it's more trouble than it's worth to speak up in front of his betters. Yet his mother insisted he still do his best, no matter what. Serving the needs of the the Hold and their Lord was the highest calling they could hope for. He didn't know if he believed this either, but she was his mother, so he obeyed.

  
~

“What your father is doing is wrong,” his mother says so gently, so pleading. She is terrified. Trechtus is becoming afraid by proximity. ‘How does she know I know?’ he wonders. He feels sick in his stomach.

"The Lord will hang us all if he finds out. Please Trechtus, show me where he keeps them. He will have mercy on us if we hand them over." The raids were getting more frequent, he knew. His father had told him this. Had forbid him from even glancing in the direction of the old decommissioned grain shack where the smugglers hid their latest shipments. He had found it by accident, loving to explore as he did. Looking back now, he imagines that his father knew even then that his time was short. He shakes his head at her and stays silent. He couldn’t be wrong if he was silent. She is near tears now but he persists. Eventually she leaves him be. He gets no sleep that night of course.

  
~  
  
'How does she know I know?' He looks up into her face. She had blue eyes too. An unusual color for Altmer, he had read in one of those many books. Right now, he hated that color more than anything else in the world.   
  
"Tell me Trechtus; just nod your head if it’s true. Is he going to the shipyard tonight?" she pleads again. He can feel tears on his own cheeks now. He can't look at her anymore, he needs to get away. But she grabs his arm then, more roughly then she had ever touched him before. He had never been disciplined as a child. He had never needed to be. He was good. Always good. He nods in the end just so she'll let him leave, and as soon as her grip lessens, he bolts out the door and into the night. He's not heading anywhere in particular, he just wants to be away from her. From there.  
  
Two days later his father and the other smugglers are hung from the newly built gallows and made an example for all. His mother too. She is stripped to the waist and flogged in the square right next to the hanging men. Twenty lashes. A mercy, since she was the one to lead them to the smugglers in the end. He gets nothing. No one knew that he knew. His mother had taken all the blame. He thinks that maybe he should have and hates himself for thinking that because it's stupid to want to be punished. Even if you were guilty.  
  
The chattel physician sees to her and things go back to normal. They work from dawn to dusk and eat quietly together in their tiny kitchen in the evening, he goes to bed on his pallet in the corner of the sitting room, and that’s that. He doesn’t read anymore. He has nothing to read. All his books are gone, every one of them. Even the ones he had so carefully hidden, thinking them safe from even the Gods themselves. His mother had apparently known of even those hidden places, for who else could have taken them? If the raids in his home had been successful, he would surely have been flogged too. Or hung like his father.   
  
His father, who still hung. Lord Gyrnasse was very fond of this particular humiliation. Leaving the dead to rot on the gallows until they fell apart of their own accord, and then letting the vultures clean up the rest, the stench as thick in the air as the ever present humidity. Acid earth of shit and rotting meat and nuttiness of feasting maggots. Anyone who tried to show even the slightest respect for the dead, even to say a quick prayer or throw a meager posy, were punished in turn, whipped or held in stocks right near the gore, till the guard grew bored of the spectacle or the punished passed out from nausea and had to be taken inside to rest.  
  
His mother tries to tuck him in that night, but he turns away from her. She leaves a few moments later. She tries again the next night but he persists. Eventually she stops trying.  
  
  
~

Three months later he wakes up, before dawn as usual, to find that his mother is not in the kitchen making breakfast. He doesn’t remember this having ever occurred in his entire eight years, nine months of life. He looks to her closed bedroom door and feels nausea creeping up on him.  
  
He makes himself breakfast and then goes outside to where they kept old grain sacks to reuse for waste. He takes one and returns inside, packing up all the ready to eat food he can find in the house and his four sets of clothes and a small steel knife, and walks out the door without looking back. It's still an hour to daylight; no one would notice him missing. He doesn’t know where he is going, only that he cannot stay here.


End file.
